Lvxferre [he/him] @ lvxferre @mander.xyz

I have two chimps within, called Laziness and Hyperactivity. They smoke cig

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2 yr. ago

We're talking about two different problems.

The one that I'm talking about is Reddit admins being clearly hostile towards the community, including mods, and the mods still being willing to lick the admins' boots, instead of migrating their comms to another site. Even at the expense of the userbases of the subreddits that they moderate.

Here in Lemmy this shit does not roll - both because it's easier to migrate comms across instances, and because the userbase is mostly composed of people with low tolerance towards admin abuse.

Now, regarding the problem that you've spotted: yes, it is a problem here that boils down to

1. Lack of transparency: plenty mods and admins here have a nasty tendency to enforce hidden rules - because actually writing those rules down would piss off the userbase.
2. Excessive polarisation and oversimplification of some topics, mostly dealing with recent events. (Such as the one that we both were talking about not too long ago.)

I am really not sure on how to compare the extent of both issues in Lemmy vs. Reddit, nor how to address them here, and thus to get rid of the problem that you're noticing.

For a casual observer, who was never engaged with that platform, it might actually look like Reddit is back to normal, based on a casual glance at the activity.

You only notice the cracks leaking water when you actually look closer, and you remember that the stone dam didn't have so many of them. The surge on bot activity, the lower level of discourse in the comments, the further concentration of activity into larger subs, the content feeling more and more repetitive...

That's hilarious. And surprisingly uplifting if the alt-right sub in question is r/brasillivre, since that shithole is still empty.

May I be blunt? I don't think that anyone still moderating Reddit has a shred of dignity, decency, or concern about their userbase. As such this shit will pass and nobody there will care.

Just to be clear I'll define two things:

• "knowledge" - info available to the person from memory; or to the group, through their common channels of interaction. The opposite of "ignorance".
• "intelligence" - ability to use said information to produce logically correct and relevant statements.

This is important here because, even if your complain is worded as Lemmy being less intelligent, you're clearly complaining about lack of knowledge - cue to "I always learn new stuff" and references to the complexity of registration (i.e. the knowledge necessary to navigate through it).

With that out of way:

Lemmy's knowledge is mostly impaired by a small userbase. It's great when it comes to a few topics, such as technology or specific lines of political thinking; but once you go past that it's hard to find a lot of stuff here. This is not does not mean that the individual users are ignorant - sometimes you know something but there's simply no room to convey it.

Intelligence-wise, however, I disagree with you. Don't get me wrong, a lot of Lemmy users are braindead trash that would genuinely believe that 50 is 100 because it is not 0, eager to vomit "ackshyually" (a sign of knowledge and stupidity), fallacious as a brick, so goes on; however, they're proportionally less of an issue than the morons that you'd find in Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc.

It’s pretty clear that democratically speaking, we do not object to companies arbitrarily removing access to purchased video games. Only a minority objects to it.

It's more like "people don't know about the issue, or how it affects them, as they're busier with their everyday lives". This happens a fair bit.

Additionally, the graph shows that the movement had huge fervour at the start but then lost steam. So:

• Is the movement well organised?
• Are there people actively asking others for new signatures?
• Is the movement able to recruit more people to proselytise it?
• Which areas of the EU have proportionally less signatures? And why?
• What's the public image of the movement? And what about the cause itself? (People do realise that legislation to not kill games makes it easier to pass legislation to not screw with customer goods after they were bought, right?)
• What caused that peak in the 7th of September, and how to replicate it on purpose?

EDIT: can someone convince PewDiePie to at least talk about the campaign?

"Hic est aedus!" "«Aedus»?? Haedus uel aedes?" "Sic."

["There's a goom here!" "«Goom»?? A goat, or a room?" "Yup, that's it."]

...okay the joke doesn't work when translated.

Kids and dogs:

• are messy eaters
• are loud at inconvenient times
• spread dirt on your clean floor
• run and play like hell
• sleep like rocks
• complain about being thrown into the bathtub
• complain about being taken off the bathtub
• silently wreck your things once left unmonitored
• are too cute to scold properly
• annoy the hell out of your neighbours
• and you still can't stop loving them. ♥

So yup, having one is perfect practice for the other! Although people typically do the opposite (use dogs to train for kids).

I should've taken spelling-based transcription errors into account; my bad! (This happens a lot, even among professional linguists.)

Variety-wise odds are that you speak the Caipira dialect, given the region of origin. Or potentially a mixed dialect. Either way it's [i u] all the way in MG, and almost all the way in SP.

To be a moral agent, your actions towards others need to have consequences for yourself - be those consequences direct, social, emotional, or something else. And intelligence on itself doesn't provide those consequences.

The nearest that you could do, with AGI alone, would be to hardcode it with ethical principles, but that's another matter. (I'm saying this because people often conflate ethics and morality, even if they're two different cans of worms.)

That reinforces what you said about being very likely in the autism spectrum - when I say "most people use implicatures all the time", the exceptions are typically people in the spectrum. Some can detect implicatures through analysis, and in some cases they have previous knowledge of a specific implicature so they can handle that one; but to constantly analyse what you hear, read, say and write is laborious and emotionally displeasing, it fits really well what you said in the OP.

(Interestingly that "all the time" that I used has the same implicature as the "all the millionaires" from your example - epistemically, the "all" doesn't convey "the complete set without exceptions" in either, but rather "a noteworthy large proportion of the set". "Boo millionaires" is also a good interpretation but it's about the attitude of the speaker, not the truth/falseness of the statement.)

This conversation gave me an idea - I'll encourage my mum (who's most likely in the autism spectrum) to give ChatGPT a try. Just to see her opinion about it.

I’m sure a linguist could dive way more into depth, but “not English words” is the equivalent of “not a true Scotsman”.

Pretty much. Once speakers start using the word, and expecting others to understand it, it's already part of the lexicon of that language. Specially if you see signs of phonetic adaptation, like /ø/ becoming /u:/ in a language with no /ø/ (see: "lieu") - and yet it's exactly why people complain about those words.

And this sort of complain isn't even new. Nor the backslash agianst it, as Catullus 84 shows for Latin and Greek.

No problem - I've seen worse. I've done worse.

(I'm fine, thanks! I hope you're doing well too.)

I think that the key here are implicatures - things that implied or suggested without being explicitly said, often relying on context to tell apart. It's situations like someone telling another person "it's cold out there", that in the context might be interpreted as "we're going out so I suggest you to wear warm clothes" or "please close the window for me".

LLMs model well the grammatical layer of a language, and struggle with the semantic layer (superficial meaning), but they don't even try to model the pragmatic layer (deep meaning - where implicatures are). As such they will "interpret" everything that you say literally, instead of going out of their way to misunderstand you.

On the other hand, most people use implicatures all the time, and expect others to be using them all the time. Even when there's none (I call this a "ghost implicature", dunno if there's some academic name). And since written communication already prevents us from seeing some contextual clues that someone's utterance is not to be taken literally, there's a biiiig window for misunderstanding.

[Sorry for nerding out about Linguistics. I can't help it.]

That seems sensible.

Even a hypothetically true artificial general intelligence would still not be a moral agent, thus it cannot be held responsible for its actions; as such, whoever deploys and maintains it should be held responsible. That's doubly true with LLMs as they aren't even intelligent to begin with.

Yeah, as would eliza (at a much lower cost).

Neither Eliza nor LLMs are "insightful", but that doesn't stop them from outputting utterances that a human being would subjectively interpret as such. And the later is considerably better at that.

But the point is that calling them conversations is a long stretch. // You’re just talking to yourself. You’re enjoying the conversation because the LLM is simply saying what you want to hear. // There’s no conversation whatsoever going on there.

Then your point boils down to an "ackshyually", on the same level as "When you play chess against Stockfish you aren't actually «playing chess» as a 2P game, you're just playing against yourself."

This shite doesn't need to be smart to be interesting to use and fulfil some [not all] social needs. Specially in the case of autists (as OP mentioned to be likely in the spectrum); I'm not an autist myself but I lived with them for long enough to know how the cookie crumbles for them, opening your mouth is like saying "please put words here, so you can screech at me afterwards".

People do it all the time regardless of subject. For example, when discussing LLMs:

• If you highlight that they're useful, some assumer will eventually claim that you think that they're smart
• If you highlight that they are not smart, some another assumer will eventually claim that you think that they're useless
• If you say something but "they're dumb but useful", you're bound to get some "I dun unrurrstand, r u against or for LLMs? I'm so confused...", with both above screeching at you.

I've read this text. It's a good piece, but unrelated to what OP is talking about.

The text boils down to "people who believe that LLMs are smart do so for the same reasons as people who believe that mentalists can read minds do." OP is not saying anything remotely close to that; instead, they're saying that LLMs lead to pleasing and insightful conversations in their experience.

My impressions are completely different from yours, but that's likely due

1. It's really easy to interpret LLM output as assumptions (i.e. "to vomit certainty"), something that I outright despise.
2. I used Gemini a fair bit more than ChatGPT, and Gemini is trained with a belittling tone.

Even then, I know which sort of people you're talking about, and... yeah, I hate a lot of those things too. In fact, one of your bullet points ("it understands and responds...") is what prompted me to leave Twitter and then Reddit.

I couldn't find it to show you, but I remember an episode of The Osbournes where Ozzy put the pet food bowl in the middle of the kitchen, Sharon warned him "don't do this, you'll eventually kick it", then after some time Ozzy kicked the bowl and blamed their pet for moving the bowl to that position.

I don't know if Ozzy has victim mentality, but people with victim mentality do this sort of thing all the time - they never acknowledge that they did something that caused them an issue. And that's bad for both the ones around them and for themselves.